A Low Power and High-Speed Conditional-Precharge Sense Amplifier Based Flip-Flop Using Single Ended Latch

Paper presents a low power, high speed, sense-amplifier based flip-flop (SAFF). The flip-flop’s power con-sumption and delay are greatly reduced by employing a new conditionally precharge sense-amplifier stage and a single-ended latch stage. Glitch-free and contention-free latch operation is achieved by using a conditional cut-off strategy. The design uses fewer transistors, has a lower clock load, and has a simple structure, all of which contribute to a near-zero setup time. When compared to previous flip-flop structures proposed for similar input/output conditions, this design’s performance and overall PDP have improved. The post layout simulation of the circuit uses 2.91µW of power and has a delay of 65.82 ps. Overall, the power-delay product has seen some enhancements. Cadence Virtuoso Designing tool with CMOS 90nm technology are used for all designs.





References:
[1] Teh, C.K.; Fujita, T.; Hara, H.; Hamda, M. A 77% energy-saving 22-transistor single-phase-clocking D-flip-flop with adaptive-coupling configuration in 40nm CMOS. In Proceedings of the IEEE Int. Solid-State Circuits.Conf, San Francisco, CA, USA, 20–24 February 2011.
[2] Masataka Matsui et al., “A 200 MHz 13 mm2-d dct macrocell using sense-amplifying pipeline flip-flop scheme”, IEEE Journal of SolidState (1) Circuits, vol. 29, pp. 1482 – 1490, January 1994.
[3] Montanaro, J.; Witek, R.; Anne, K.; Black, A.; Cooper, E.; Dobberpuhl, D.; Donahue, P.; Eno, J.; Hoeppner, W.;Kruckemyer, D.; et al. A 160-MHz 32-b 0.5-W CMOS RISC microprocessor. IEEE J. Solid-State (2) Circuits 1996, 31, 1703–1717.
[4] Nikolic, B., et al., “Improved sense-amplifier-based flip-flop design and measurements”, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 35, pp.876 – 884, June 2000.
[5] A.G.M. Strollo, David De Caro, Ettore Napoli, Nicola Petra, “A novel high-speed sense-amplifier-based flip-flop”, IEEE Transaction on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) System, vol. 13, pp. 1266-1274, 2005.
[6] Kim, J.-C.; Jang, Y.-C.; Park, H.-J. CMOS sense amplifier-based flip-flop with two N-C2MOS output latches.Electron. Lett. 2000, 36, 498–500.
[7] Lin, J.-F.; Hwang, Y.-T.; Wong, C.-S.; Shey, M.-H. Single-ended struc-ture sense-amplifier based flip-flop for low-power systems. Electron. Lett. 2015, 51, 20–21.
[8] Hanwool Jeong, Tae Woo Oh, Seung Chul Song and Seong-Ook Jung, “Sense-Amplifier-Based flip flop with transition completion detection for low voltage operation” IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems, vol. 26, pp. 609-620, April 2018.